Mike Pride's From Bacteria to Boys performs on Friday, Oct. 17 at Firehouse 12 in New Haven.

Birth, death, everything in between: Mike Pride has it covered.

Sort of: Pride, an NYC-based drummer, composer and visual artist, released two albums last year: "Drummer's Corpse," an unsettling, two-movement, conceptual hourlong work for seven drummers (Oran Canfield, Russell Greenberg, John McLellan, Bobby Previte, Ches Smith, Tyshawn Sorey and Pride himself performed on the recording), guitar, bass and vocals (also by Pride); and "Birthing Days," a collection of far-reaching song-length pieces, composed by Pride and performed by From Bacteria to Boys, his quartet (saxophonist Jon Irabagon, keyboard player Alexis Marcelo and bassist Peter Bitenc).

The two albums were recorded a week apart but never intended to be released together. (The first draft of "Drummer's Corpse" was composed in 2005; the music on "Birthing Days" was written more recently, as a celebration of the birth of Pride's oldest child.)

Pride, a Maine native, landed in New York in 2000 to attend the New School. With Japanese guitarist/vocalist Kentaro Saito, a fellow student, he formed Dynamite Club, an experimental rock band that toured the world. Pride went on to record with forward-thinking musicians from all over the rock/jazz/avant-garde spectrum: Mick Barr, Eugene Chadbourne, Nels Cline, Trevor Dunn, Mary Halvorson, Nona Hendryx, William Parker and others.

"I don't know that I ever had any breaks, so to speak, where someone hired me and exposed me to a bunch of people," Pride said. "I was just always kind of hustling. I always had many bands of my own, with all kinds of different people. I always had a community of my peers around me, just keeping myself and everybody around me working."

"Drummer's Corpse," Pride said, was originally an absurdist vocal piece. "I had a feeling I was becoming one of these typical competitive drummers," he said, "competing with all my fellow drummers, and I didn't want anything to do with it." By reworking "Drummer's Corpse" into a piece that would feature his favorite drummers, "I'd be forced not to judge all these people," he said. "I'd just be forced to appreciate everybody and get over that competitive business stuff."

Meanwhile, Dynamite Club was breaking up. Pride was still more known in experimental rock circles than as a jazz drummer. "People were asking me to do rock shows, and I didn't want to do a rock band anymore," Pride said. Using a revolving cast of players, Pride brought "Drummer's Corpse" to various stages, but recording the work wasn't an option. "I barely had the money to pay the players to do it live with me… I always had a certain minimal standard in my mind for how I wanted people to be compensated for their time to be on the record, and certainly at this point in my life that was not financially possible."

Enter Kickstarter. "I thought the Kickstarter thing would be super-depressing and two people would donate and it would be humiliating," Pride said, but the recording was ultimately funded. "I got well over what I needed. I had over 130 donations, some of which were really big."

While "Drummer's Corpse," Pride said, came from a "very dark place," "Birthing Days," Pride's third release as From Bacteria to Boys (and the first to feature Irabagon) was "jovial and happy." There are several stylistic threads on "Birthing Days," any one of which could be spun out across an entire album of its own: swing/shuffle grooves ("Brestwerp"), pointillistic chamber jazz ("79 Beatdowns of Infinite Justice, the"), R&B (the title track), and so on. "All the pieces were written to tell a story. If it weren't for that, I probably wouldn't make an album that's covering so much ground… I definitely felt like I wanted to sum up my interests to that point."

With the two recordings completed, Pride felt the connections between them were too strong to ignore. "My goal was to record 'Drummer's Corpse' over the summer and have it out four months later, and 'Birthing Days' would be out after that," he said. "I just started realizing the unintentional parallels of those two albums." Steven Joerg, of NYC-based indie label AUM Fidelity, was funding and releasing "Birthing Days"; Pride told him he could have "Drummer's Corpse" for a simultaneous release. "He thought that was a great idea, as I did. It was just kind of a happy coincidence, once we realized that was happening."

Pride brings From Bacteria to Boys to Firehouse 12 in New Haven on Friday, Oct. 17. He continues to work as a sideman around NYC while focusing on his own music.

"I like to create a varied body of work," Pride said, "and whatever unifying factors there are are not my concern. It all comes from the same person. It all comes from an honest place, so however it ties together: that's for the listeners to decide."